Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-1.34: Smite

When I stepped outside, I no longer stood alone on the hill. The restless dead gathered in the bell tower’s shadow. Mistwalkers all, clad in the raiments of a dead kingdom, pallid faces framing hungry eyes.

They had emerged from the marshes at the hill’s base, or crawled out of upturned graves beyond the road, mud still clinging to them. Waiting for me.

Well enough.

Dawn had come and gone. Thunder rumbled above. A light rain began to fall.

“You were a fool to come back.” Vaughn faced me from the center of the scattered pack of undead. Encased in a set of old, battered armor, he was tall as me, his wide shoulders made into metal hills by studded pauldrons. He held his heavy broadsword in his fist, the nicks of many campaigns marking its blade.

Unlike the rest, he had a mount. A brutish chimera of a kind I hadn’t seen before, perhaps brought over from the continent or bred in the baron’s labs. A massive hyena, long tailed, its purple tongue lolling. It snickered at me as the ghouls spread out to cover the church yard.

More than a dozen ghouls surrounded their vice-captain, forming a half ring around the front of the church. In the rain and mist, their armor seemed formed of pale shadows and their eyes gleamed with odlight.

No sign of Catrin. No warning from her about this ambush, either. She’d betrayed me after all, then. Perhaps this had always been her plan. Had she known what waited inside the church?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the task I’d been given. The doom in my hand. I tightened my grip on the axe.

“We should thank you for offing that William boy,” Vaughn continued, his tone conversational. His mount lurched forward, letting out a hungry cackle. He forced it back with a savage jerk on the reins. “He would have been a problem.”

I started to understand this strange situation better then. It didn’t change my next steps, or my goal, but a clearer picture formed in my mind of the previous night’s events.

I regarded them without words, and saw a few take nervous steps back. The Wil-O’ Wisps lurking within my pointed cowl made the inside of the hood glow with eerie blue light, masking my face. More of that light spilled from the narrow gap down the front of my cloak. I couldn’t see the effect myself, but I imagined it would be uncanny.

The wisps giggled playfully, the sound just on the edge of hearing. More of the ghouls began to lose hold of their bravado. They weren’t mindless creatures. Their undead state stemmed from a gluttonous desire to remain alive, after all, and what is more human than that?

“I’m here for Orson Falconer,” I said, my voice emerging from the elf light with a faint echo. “Step aside.”

“Sure.” Vaughn lifted his scarred blade. Unlike the others, he wasn’t impressed. “We’ll do that.”

Fine then.

I lifted my axe as amber fire played along its edge. I ran the fingers of my right hand along the brassy alloy, leaving tiny trails of golden light where I touched.

“This is pure aura,” I said to the Mistwalkers. “It cuts you, and your spirits will lose their grip on those borrowed bones. Won’t take much more than a nick.”

Vaughn bared his yellow teeth in a snarl. “I’ve had enough of this. Take him.”

The Mistwalkers were veteran soldiers to a man. They didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter. I hadn’t expected my attempt at intimidation to work. Hadn’t wanted it to, really.

They’d earned this for the old troll, for the villagers, and for five centuries of murder.

I waited until the nearest ghouls were perhaps five paces away, then flashed into motion. I went forward in a rippling flurry of blood red cloak and dancing faerie light, lashing out with the axe.

The bell atop the chapel tolled. I couldn't say who was responsible. Maybe Brother Edgar, the one survivor of that nightmare I’d failed to stop. Maybe it was the wind, or the tortured spirits bound forever within that desecrated hall.

Maybe it was the ghost of Preoster Micah, whose spirit remained bound to this place.

The gladius of the nearest ghoul shattered along with the hand holding it. The mercenary stumbled back, maimed hand burning with a molten light. I stopped my forward motion, brought the axe up, then down to cleave into the undead soldier’s shoulder.

There was a bright flash, a smell like nothing so much as one might find in a sunlit glade, and the ghoul fell to one knee. I’d severed his right shoulder down to one lung. The edges of the wound burned with golden flame. He opened his mouth as though to scream, and more of that light spilled from it. No sound came other than something like the rumbling of a furnace.

He fell, a smoking husk, and the spirit tethered to the corpse came free in a ghastly wail before it too was consumed by aureflame.

I lifted the axe as the rest of the Mistwalkers froze in their tracks, lifting arms and shields to cover their eyes from the flare of light. I let out a breath, and it emerged as a dawn lit plume.

I began to kill.

Distracted by the dramatic death of their comrade, two more Mistwalkers fell as my sanctified weapon lashed out. I wielded it more like a greatsword than a proper axe, cleaving and slicing, blessed bronze sheering through chainmail and severing paper thin ghoul flesh. Each undead soldier who fell erupted in a briefly lived plume molten gold, their undead spirits losing hold on ancient bones as sacred fire consumed them.

It was a painful, nasty way to go, an unmaking which tormented the spirit as much as the body. There would be no peaceful rest for these. The flame would hurl them into the Dark, where they would burn for centuries.

Outnumbered as I was, the mercenaries should have been able to easily overwhelm me. Instead, terrified of the doom I brought, they backed away and lost their coordination, allowing me to dance through them, swinging my burning axe as I went.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I went through them like a killing wind, and within moments three more ghouls had fallen before they’d barely had the chance to muster a defense.

Then Vice-Captain Vaughn spurred his ghastly mount forward. Huge, a nightmare of stinking fur and grinning teeth, the chimera lunged at me. A heavy head alchemically engineered to snap bones surged forward, maw wide. Its carrion reek filled my senses.

It died on the first swing. Faen Orgis clove the beast’s skull, but its forward momentum didn’t halt. Hundreds of pounds of war chimera struck me hard in a shower of burning fur and gore, and I went down into the mud. Only my new armor saved my life, dampening the impact.

Vaughn rolled from his saddle expertly, landing on his feet. He planted a boot on his dead mount’s shoulder and brought his sword up to take my head.

The ghoul’s scarred sword met the edge of my axe as I rose, battered but intact. I batted the swing aside, but the Edaean legionairre was wicked strong. My bones quivered from the shock of impact, my abused muscles groaning.

The ghoul warrior let out a shout, surging forward with a terrible fury before I could get my proper balance. I barely caught another killing strike on my weapon, ducked the second, then fell back as his onslaught went unabated.

We dueled beneath the bell tower, moving around the mound of the dead chimera. He didn’t stop, didn’t need to breathe or rest, didn’t need to care if his muscles tore and his bones fractured. He had the strength of the dead, and the hate of lifetimes dedicated to war.

Vaughn was an old ghoul as well as a veteran of many wars. He’d probably fed on many potent bones across a hundred battlefields, and I’d have had difficulty finding anyone with that kind of implacable killing potence outside of the oldest elves. He was stronger than Irn Bale had been. Less graceful, true, but he had a wicked cleverness and a cruel edge to his swordplay.

This chapt𝒆r is updated by frёewebηovel.cѳm.

Vaughn jabbed his sword at my eye, intending to puncture my skull. I flinched, bringing up the vambrace encasing my left forearm. The blade skidded off the elf metal, leaving a shallow groove to join a hundred others. I had an opening and tried it, but another Mistwalker swung at my legs with a poleaxe. I bared my teeth in effort, dancing back before the hooked blade could hamstring me.

Vaughn had distance again and used it well, shouting as he chopped one-handed. His blade skidded off my hauberk.

“Your irk friends give you some new toys?” Vaughn hissed through teeth nearly too large for his mouth.

I had no interest just then in banter. I took my axe in both hands, bringing it back behind my head — not for a swing, but to block the sword of a ghoul who’d gotten behind me. I used her own momentum to carry the swing around, letting it go harmlessly into the trampled grass, then punched her in the jaw hard enough to shatter marrow crunching teeth. She went down, letting out an almost jackal-like yip.

I flicked the blood from my knuckles as I caught my breath. The Mistwalkers, still numbering more than half a dozen, paced around me like a pack of starving direwolves.

I was out of breath. They didn’t see it through the wisp light filling my hood, but heard it. My injuries accumulated from more than a week of near constant fighting, most only half healed, screamed protests at my senses.

Vaughn barked out a laugh. “Orson told us you were some kind of holy killer. I admit, you put on a good show, but we’ve killed your like before. You tire like any man. Still…”

He clacked his yellow teeth together. “I bet that’s some ripe aura in those bones.”

“I want one of his ribs,” another ghoul said. He drooled like a hound.

“We’ll all get our share,” Vaughn growled, the same hunger making his voice rough. “Company rules.”

Discipline broke, and several of the undead mercenaries lunged forward ahead of their leader. Ready, I swung my axe up. A sunburst of auratic light blazed to life from the runic blade. The ghouls stumbled back, screeching and blind.

I sprinted at Vaughn. He was the most dangerous enemy present. If I killed him, the others would fall like chaff.

Eyes scorched, the Mistwalker commander spat something in a language I didn’t recognize. Grating, harsh syllables, a blemish on the fabric of the world. His iron sword began to boil with a green-black smog, the same power writhing up one steel clad arm.

His aura. He was a fucking adept, too.

Of course he would be.

He swung, and the smog boiled across the ground in front of him, erupting in a curtain of poisonous fumes. I barely stopped before barreling straight into the curtain, my cloak carried forward by wind and momentum. The edges of the red cloak sizzled where they touched.

Art. I should have expected a fighter as experienced as the vice-captain to have one. It reminded me of the choking smoke of battlefields, of alchemical craft erupting in toxic clouds that scalded the lungs and blistered the skin. A manifestation of a soul steeped in gore and iron hate.

I threw an arm over my face to shield myself from the fumes and leapt away, silently cursing. Too late. Some of the fumes had gotten into my hood. My mouth became suddenly, horribly dry. My eyes started to itch, then burn. Several of the wisps hiding in my cowl withered and died, dimming the light inside my cloak.

“Stings, doesn’t it!?”

Vaughn came through the black fumes, a titan of iron with yellow teeth bared in a macabre grin. The fumes clung to his armor and shaved scalp, writhing around his huge frame in a protective cloud. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, turning them red and terrifying.

The wisps in the cloak with me whispered fearfully. I couldn’t understand them, but got the message well enough — I was in trouble.

Vaughn brought up his sword, and once again it boiled with hateful fumes. His grin widened until it seemed to split his face in half. His skin was pallid as the corpse he should have been centuries before.

Before he could bring that finishing blow down, he staggered to one side. A look of confusion crossed his twisted features, then pain. He reached up with his free left hand, and found the elf forged dagger embedded into his neck just below the right ear.

His neck twisted to one side, his features contorted into something truly nightmarish as he fell to one knee. A strange keening sound came from his lips as the banesilver tormented the ghost trapped inside his body.

“Thanks for giving me a bunch of darkness to hide in, you marrow licking bitch.”

Catrin emerged from the billowing well of fumes, apparently unaffected by their bite. I could barely see her through the red haze my vision had become, but her expression was nearly as frightening as those of the ghoul’s — her skin had turned paler, her brown hair taking on an ashy hue.

When she peeled back her lips, her canines had elongated into sharp fangs.

Vaughn groaned, still shivering from the cursed metals touched, but he wasn’t out of the fight yet. He twisted and swung, moving with a jarring speed. Catrin let out a yelp, hurling up her arms to defend herself. She took a deep cut above elbow that sent her stumbling back. She tripped over her long dress and fell into the mud.

Vaughn rose, ripped the elven blade out of his neck, and hurled it. It missed Catrin’s face by inches, making her flinch. He advanced on her, insane with rage.

I squeezed the branch of Faen Orgis, letting it bite into my flesh. As it took my blood, the branch crackled and grew several inches. I lunged.

Vaughn lifted his sword.

I swung, mostly still blind from the stinging in my eyes. If I misjudged the cut—

I didn’t. Vaughn’s head went tumbling through the air several times before landing in the mud, plopping in the muck like some grotesque pumpkin.

The huge body, clad in iron and somehow still intimidating, stumbled. I recalled how that one ghoul had survived even with half its skull lopped off. I tensed, prepared to parry.

I hadn’t used aureflame on that ghoul in the village. This time the headless body fell, erupting with amber fire, and did not get back up.

It took another moment for my own magic to counteract Vaughn’s. My mouth and eyes still burned. I could see well enough, though the edges of my vision hazed. Catrin stared up at me, muddy and shocked but alive.

I turned to the rest of the ghouls. My hand tightened around the axe’s grip, making the oak creak. Aureflame rippled along my arms, blazed in my eyes.

The Mistwalkers stared at me and the dhampir, blank-eyed and bestial.

I took a step toward them.

They fled.